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Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, "was way off." It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms -- at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren't up to the task. "Diamond failure," they note, "is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH," where SMH means "solid metallic hydrogen" rather than "shaking my head." The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally -- they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen's breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science.
Use it to power our cellphones?
Who's hull is described as "an element not found on earth"
// elements are elements
/// except maybe that "island of stability"
/ particular pet peeve of mine
... this endeavor was not simply a colossal waste of time?
Serious question.... are any practical implications to this at all?
80 years seems like a long time searching for something when you aren't expecting any kind of positive net benefit from the fruits of that search.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Done 20 years ago in a gas gun:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/26/science/big-gun-makes-hydrogen-into-a-metal.html
More stories like this one please!
Any estimate as to the density of this solid metal hydrogen?
Might this be what the core of super-dense celestial bodies consist of?
Fucking bad ass. This just strikes me as awesome. It's theoretical science made real. It's like a scientific profession of faith in reason made physical.
Questions abound!
Would the metal transition back to gas at one atmosphere? Would low temperatures retard the transition? Does it act as a superconductor? Is there any speculation on why the diamond destabilizes at a greater frequency under laser illumination? What likely metallurgical properties is it likely to exhibit? Is it likely we'll be able to take advantage of any of them at room temp / one atmosphere ?
This story isn't as awesome as the recent one about the man-pig monsters that mad scientists can now create, but it is still right up there in the awesome category.
Shaking my head? I always thought it meant so much hate.
What's with the unnecessary capitalization?
WTF? Perhaps those scientists were unaware that hydrogen has always been classified as a metal on the periodic table.
Why don't these articles have pictures!! I want to SEE the metal!!! Don't these people have smartphones? Why aren't they taking selfies and posting them in the papers? Please, could someone kindly link some pictures? Thank you.
In high school, I asked my grade 13 chemistry teacher why Hydrogen was on the left column of the periodic table where everything else was a metal. I was told because it had one electron in the outer shell, like everything else in that column.
The conversation went something like "But, if everything else in the column is a metal, doesn't that imply Hydrogen is a metal?" "No, it's a gas." "But hydrogen can be cooled to a liquid and it behaves like other liquefied metals (ie Mercury), couldn't it be cooled to the point where it is solid and will it behave like a metal?" "Go away."
In university, I asked the same question and was told that my reasoning was not unique and the idea was put forward many years before but that we'll probably never produce the necessary conditions on earth where Hydrogen will be a solid and we can see if it will be a metal.
Nice to see that we've done something that was thought to be, if not impossible, extremely difficult.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If nothing else, this research has resulted in the technology for compressing something at incredible pressures, never before thought possible.
I'm sure it's suitable for compressing The Flash's costume to the point where it could be hidden in a ring!
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I'm sure that Finnish guy (and his giggling wife) can try an episode with hydrogen.
https://youtu.be/69fr5bNiEfc
Welcome to the Hoodralic Press Channel. Today we are going to be crushings some Hy-drogen. And here we go!
Had to do it. Sorry. ðY
The Hindenburg disaster happened on May 6, 1937, almost exactly 80 years go. Have you seen the pictures? If you saw it going down in flames, you can't tell me that it wouldn't be the most metal thing you've ever seen. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... and that, as we all know... is transparent aluminum.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Forget suits. Entire vehicles and cabins in small packages.
with the original estimation?
What can explain the 80x miss?
What about it being hydrogen means that it does have to stay at that pressure?
Failing to to take a step back and identify why something is difficult and then figuring out to eliminate that difficulty happens a lot as far as I can tell.Hopefully, things will not stay "not that unusual".
Need For Speed Rivals Download ast October, Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera invited a few colleagues to stop by his lab to glimpse something that may not exist anywhere else in the universe. Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed
Extreme bling just got a lot lighter!!!!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
http://www.nature.com/news/phy...
"the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals"
Water is reflective. Hot air on the pavement is reflective at shallow angles. Neither of these are metals.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I, for one, wanted to see pictures (why does no one ever think of the pictures??!). There are some here: https://www.thenews.com.pk/lat...
A spokesman for hydrogen said earlier - "There. HAPPY NOW?"
An 80 year quest? Hope the scientists gained a few levels for that one.
American cretins...
If we're lucky, we might see something like that after another 80 years.
Ehh, no. You are talking about the definition of "metal" in chemistry, which is a category of elements. The "transparent Aluminum" (or Aluminium if you prefer) as established in Star Trek, is not some sort of exotic state of the elemental Al, but a compound that can be created (using technology that is not futuristic). In fact, "transparent aluminum" doesn't even fit the alternate, more "loose", non-chemistry definition of "metal", as it is neither opaque, nor shiny. So, we are simply looking for a very strong transparent compound based on Aluminum. Sapphire and ruby might fit the bill if they can be made clear, but, as I learned from another post, there is something called Aluminium oxynitride and marketed as ALON, which makes pretty good transparent armor and generally seems to fit the description very well.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
That is the best thing ever happened to me. Love you, Ars Technica.
See :
https://www.scientificamerican...
Quote :
Five experts told Natureâ(TM)s news team that they do not yet believe the claim, and need more evidence. âoeI donâ(TM)t think the paper is convincing at all,â says Paul Loubeyre, a physicist at Franceâ(TM)s Atomic Energy Commission in BruyÃres-le-ChÃtel.
Video/Pic's, or it didn't happen.
Would anyone familiar with the reported conditions/requirements be kind enough to translate this into likely/theoretical points of existence given our understanding of the wider universe?
For example, we've long speculated that the heat and mass of Jupiter might be such that hydrogen in the gas giant's atmosphere might be "condensed out" in liquid form, although if I understand correctly there will be other factors [such as gas densities and the prevalence of free hydrogen at the depths necessary for it to be transformed] remain speculation at this point...
However, what about other locations? Does our understanding of stars [containing lots of hydrogen] suggest that they might contain it. For example, could it exist at a boundary layer between the outer portion of the star and denser core materials? Given it's prevalence in the universe and the gravitational force of black holes, could it exist somewhere around the event horizon?
Just curious really.
Also, the difference between projected and discovered conditions required for formation seem quite significant. Wondering if that is an indication that our understanding of the physics is still a little way off?
Cool, now we're one step closer to making Hellbores.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The paper (preprint in arxiv ) is regarded with serious doubts by many physicists.
There are a number of issues with this paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pa... . The first is that the achieved pressure beyond 335 GPa are seat-of-the-pants estimates. The second is that they did not publish the mass of the "grain of ruby" and they did not account for what happened to this grain of ruby during the experiment. A one-atom layer of Al and Cr from the Al2:O3:Cr Ruby on the outside of their compressed 30 micron in diameter mass could account for their physical observations. My largest issue with the paper is they did not describe the depressurizing process. Metastability is a key indicator of metallic hydrogen and yet the paper omits any good or bad observations related to metastability. What happened at the end of the experiment? Why wasn't this reported?
as in "why am I here" reflective?
The article says they literally hand-cranked up the pressure to achieve this result.
Wouldn't you like to be that guy? "_ I _ was the guy whose hand physically created metallic hydrogen for the first time on planet earth".
That's pretty darn cool, if you ask me.
Other physicists have expressed skepticism over the Harvard group's claims of making metallic hydrogen. Importantly, the claim is made on the basis of one single experiment that has not yet been replicated by the group reporting the claims. From a news article published in Nature :
Other researchers aren't convinced. It’s far from clear that the shiny material the researchers see is actually hydrogen, says geophysicist Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. Goncharov has criticized the Silvera lab’s methods before. He suggests that the shiny material may be alumina (aluminium oxide), which coats the tips of the diamonds in the anvil, and may behave differently under pressure.
Loubeyre and others think that Silvera and Dias are overestimating the pressure that they reached, by relying on an imprecise calibration between turns of the screw and pressure inside the anvil. Eugene Gregoryanz, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, adds that part of the problem is that the researchers took only a single detailed measurement of their sample at the highest pressure — making it hard to see how pressure shifted during the experiment.
They should have just used a car of diamonds and a wall made out of diamonds and smashed them together in a chamber of hydrogen.
This is just a semantic nitpick question about terminology. (I am not a chemist. Nor a physicist. So, humor me if this question is stupid.)
Should we think of Hydrogen as being metal -- one that happens to have been given a bad rap in the past because the "right" temperature/pressure point where it's metalic-ness would have been obvious, just happens not to be exactly common in our everyday experience. In the taxonomy of elements, isn't a given element on periodic table either considered a metal or not?
Or is hydrogen qualitatively different, somehow? e.g. is it semiconductor like Silicon?
Also, are there any other elements with metalic/non-metalic versions of (say) their solid states?
If we add a bit of oxygen to the mix, might we get metal water?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
If this new super-lightweight metal can't be used to finally build me a flying car, I don't care about it... :) smiley face included for the humour impaired.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Next 2:00AM Tweet: "We got something you don't got #Putin" "I'm going golfing tomorrow #Putin Ha ha"
This is exactly the type of thing they want their future US research dollars going into. None of that wasted warm-whatever research, its millions of new manufacturing jobs on the line! Those Chinese and Mexicans still have a long way to to go to catch up before making that cheap stuff. We will just tax it at the border, raising our own prices, to pay for the wall that they will just swim around, dig under, or buy a plane ticket to fly over legally. We'll show them who's really paying for that wall!
I assume that one person got to "hand crank" whatever apparatus they had to operate the diamond anvil...
Which means someone forevermore at nerdy parties is going to be able to say (preferably in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice), that they are so "pumped up" that they can "Crush Hydrogen so much it turns into metal!"...
Bonus points if they mention the fact that it could potentially be "liquid metal" and some ominous reference to T-1000.